Stories Of Snakes And Skins Still Slither Along In Local Lore

FLASHBACK - ORANGE COUNTY HISTORY

December 27, 1998|By Mark Andrews of The Sentinel Staff

Many people find nothing amusing about snakes - among them a former Orlando Sentinel editor who once ran over a snake in the road, then went out and bought four new tires because he couldn't be sure which one had crushed the slithering reptile.

But when snake stories happen to someone else, they can be amusing.

The first is borrowed from Edward T. Winn of Maitland, an amateur historian and storyteller who often speaks at local schools. The last two are from Eldon Gore's 1949 book, History of Orlando.

Essie Mae. When Winn was in high school, he and his friends used to catch poisonous snakes. Sometimes they would skin them and mount the skins on boards. Winn used to leave the heads on the skins with the mouth wide open and the fangs protruding. Then he would add glass eyes for extra effect.

Winn got out of the Army in 1948 and bought a used Buick to make the drive home from New Jersey. When he returned to Orange County, he put one of those rolled-up snakeskins over the car's passenger side visor and forgot about it.

One of his top priorities when he got home was to get a date with a pretty young woman he had gone to school with, Essie Mae Williams.

Winn got her phone number, and she accepted a date to go to the movies. Winn said she was so beautiful, he wanted to marry her on the spot.

She lived in Longwood, and they were going to a theater in Sanford. Winn picks up the story: ``Everything went well until I turned right off the Longwood Road to go to Sanford. We had to go over a rough railroad crossing, and that's when it happened. That snakeskin, with its mouth wide open, fangs extended ... fell right into Essie Mae's lap. She just stared at it for a brief second and then started to scream like you've never heard before.

``She tried to open her door and jump out of the car while it was still moving, but she couldn't get the door open because those old Buick doors opened opposite most car doors. Then she dove for my door and got pinned between me and the steering wheel. I could not see where I was going and ran into the railroad guard and busted out my right headlight before I could get stopped.

``Essie Mae just kept screaming, `Take me home! Take me home!' I kept trying to tell her it was only a skin, but she never heard me. Well, I knew right then the wedding was off. I never saw Essie Mae again. She would not answer my phone calls. I threw away that snakeskin. It had cost me a marriage.''

Reptiles on the loose. A.M. Nicholson was a taxidermist and a dealer in birds, snakes and alligators who had a curio shop on west Church Street around the turn of the century. He kept a large stock of reptiles in a pen behind his store, according to Gore's account.

One night, a large alligator knocked down a part of the fence, and all the snakes and gators got loose.

Men who came to work at a nearby livery barn the next morning found the place crawling with alligators and snakes. The workers refused to go inside and take care of the horses. The police called Nicholson to come and round up his reptiles.

After that, Nicholson was forced to keep his slithering and crawling menagerie outside of the city.

Strange sights. Gore, who walked around much of the residential area near downtown for years as a letter carrier, gives these accounts of his encounters with snakes in the early part of the 20th century:

``Going into a yard on Hughey Street, I saw a snake with two long horns. This was the first `horned snake' I had ever seen. I struck it with my whip and to my surprise out of the snake's mouth came a frog. The snake was swallowing the frog head first, and the hind legs of the frog sticking out gave the appearance of horns.''

Riding around Lake Lucerne one day, Gore saw what appeared to be one snake with two tails and no head. Cracking his trusty whip again, he was surprised to see a black snake turn loose of a water moccasin.

``He was swallowing it head foremost, and that was why it had the appearance of a snake with a tail at each end.''

This week in Orange County history:

Mosquito and Monroe counties were created out of the southern part of St. Johns County, which until then made up the entire Florida peninsula, in 1824. (Mosquito was further subdivided over the years and was renamed Orange County in 1845.)

A three-day freeze severely damaged citrus crops in 1886.

Winter Garden's post office opened in 1892.

Another freeze, this one known as the first phase of the Great Freeze, destroyed the county's entire citrus crop in 1894. (The second phase of the freeze, which killed 90 percent of the trees, occurred seven weeks later.)